


Pusillanimous

by Lsusanna



Series: The word you're thinking of is anathema...or maybe panacea--but it's all semantics from here. [2]
Category: Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes, The Avengers (Marvel Movies), The Avengers (Marvel) - All Media Types
Genre: Aftermath of Torture, Angst, Artist Steve Rogers, Clint Is a Good Bro, Deaf Clint Barton, F/M, Getting Back Together, Hurt/Comfort, In which I ignore Cap2 and SHIELD is still SHIELD, Kid Fic, Natasha Needs a Hug, Not Canon Compliant, Pregnancy, Psychological Torture, Skrull(s), Skrulls are strange motherfuckers, Steve Feels, Steve needs like four, Torture, romanogers - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-19
Updated: 2014-12-29
Packaged: 2018-03-02 04:41:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 10,242
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2799953
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lsusanna/pseuds/Lsusanna
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Does any one know where the love of God goes <br/>When the waves turn the minutes to hours...</p><p>The church bell chimed till it rang twenty-nine times <br/>For each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.”</p><p>-taken from the lyrics of ‘The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald’, by Gordon Lightfoot</p><p> </p><p>Natasha Romanov isn’t meant for the nice things Steve Rogers should have had. She wishes the Skrull invasion had never happened. She thinks it would have been easier if they had never started what they had. She thinks, now, that it would have been better if Steve had been able to stay in his era, and she in hers. Hell, she’s desperate enough to entertain thoughts of it being better if he had died in that plane, and she had never accepted Clint’s offer. </p><p>But the farther back you go, the more confusing having regrets becomes. And no one’s ever cared what Natasha Romanov thinks.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**_“We're more of the love, blood, and rhetoric school. Well, we can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and we can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and we can do you all three concurrent or consecutive. But we can't give you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory. They're all blood, you see.”_ ** **_  
―Tom Stoppard, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead_ **

****

****

 

Natasha stops as she hears a throat cleared behind her. She turns, and sees Tony leaning against a wall. “Hi,” she says.

 

“Hi,” he returns. “Fury been keeping you busy, I assume?”

 

“Yes,” she answers. “…I thought you would have had JARVIS lock me out or something,” she says.

 

“Oh, don’t you worry your pretty little head, Miss Rushman, I thought about it,” Tony counters.

 

“I’m never going to live that down, huh?” Natasha asks.

 

“Among other things.”

 

“So we’ve cut to the chase,” Natasha hums.

 

“Yeah, yeah we have,” Tony says, pushing himself off the wall. “It…six months. Six months, Natasha. You gave him six months.”

 

“I know.”

 

“Something like that takes longer than six damn months to get over.”

 

“It’s different when you’re in it,” Natasha says, momentarily defensive. “But yeah; you’re right. It does.”

 

“We were all in it, Natasha,” Tony mutters. “So what’s it been, about three months? Why are you back now?”

 

“I shouldn’t have left,” Natasha says in answer.

 

“Yeah, but you did,” Tony insists, and Natasha supposes she deserves his making this hard for her. “So why now?”

 

Natasha sighs. “I need to…fix…things…if I can. I want to fix things.”

 

“Gonna need a lot of glue,” Tony replies.

 

“Fuckin’ A.”

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Natasha stands by the wall, the elevator behind her, the living room and kitchenette of Steve’s floor spreading out before her. He hasn’t noticed her yet, and she doesn’t know how to announce herself. So he unloads his dishwasher, and she watches, her arms crossed low over her waist.

 

“Hey sailor,” she calls softly, and Steve freezes. He snaps the fork he’s holding, and the metal’s jagged edge slices a deep furrow into his palm as he gives a low curse, taking whatever dignity she’d hoped to leave him with.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Natasha sits in one of the tall bar chairs and leans her elbows on the counter, watching the steam rise off her mug of tea when she isn’t watching Steve’s profile. He stands in the kitchenette, his own mug ignored where it sits on the counter he stands with his back to, both his bandaged and unscathed hands braced against the Corian.

 

“…You left,” he muses, watching the floor.

 

“I know,” Natasha almost whispers.

 

“You left,” he says again, with more conviction, an accusation in his inflection.

 

“I’m sorry,” she says earnestly, and Steve turns his head and looks at her, straight at her, with those expressive blue eyes. Natasha sighs. “I shouldn’t have left,” she begins. “I shouldn’t have left. And I am so, so sorry I did, Steve, it’s…it’s one of the worst things I’ve done. And I am so, so sorry,” she says, pleads, even. And it’s true. While the Black Widow and Natalia Romanova have committed far worse atrocities she takes full responsibility for, Natasha hasn’t hurt someone like this in a long, long time.

 

Steve doesn’t ask her why she left, and she’s pretty sure he already knows, but he does ask her why she came back. Natasha sighs; she really does owe him the truth, doesn’t she? “Because I love you,” she says.

 

“Yeah?” Steve asks quietly, sardonically.

 

“Yes,” Natasha replies, tone growing forceful, “because I love you. I’ve always loved you. You have to believe at least that. I know I’ve done things, and things have happened, and things are going to happen, but I do love you. I _wouldn’t_ have come back here, Steve, if I didn’t. Just please try…to keep that in mind. …Okay?”

 

Steve gives her a long look. The abyss behind his eyes has grown shallower, but they’re still hollow. “Okay,” he says.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

It’s a long first week. Long and awkward. It takes that long for them to stay in the same room together for a reasonable amount of time. They sit in the living room, dark with the hour, their silence terse and born of a lack of vocabulary as opposed to a lack of desire to speak.

 

“I know why you left,” Steve says, the one to break the ice. “I understand. I…I get it,” he says, and then sighs. “I guess what I mean is…you’re good. You don’t have to…earn back…anything. I…I understand.”

 

“Thank you,” Natasha says.

 

Steve nods, and turns his head to look at her. “Can we just…start with a clean slate?”

 

“I’d like that.”

 

Three nights later, Natasha is padding to the guest bedroom she’s been sleeping in, when Steve calls out, “You know, you don’t have to keep staying there.”

 

Natasha turns back to him, lips curved in the beginnings of a smile. “Yeah?”

 

“Not if you don’t want to.”

 

The smile stays, and Natasha alters her course from the guest bedroom to the master.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

“Clint, come on, wake up!” Natasha calls, pounding on his bedroom door. “I know you can hear me, because if you didn’t have your aids in you wouldn’t have been able to tell me to fuck off, so come on!”

 

Bobbi’s the one to swing the door inward. “He dislikes you in this moment, you know,” she says.

 

“Vacation day! Taken!” Clint calls, almost in answer.

 

Bobbi snorts, amused. “Well, Hill wants me, so I guess I’ll leave you two to your fun. Have a nice day, honey,” she calls over her shoulder to Clint as she strides to the elevator.

 

“I am not awake!” Clint moans despairingly.

 

Natasha makes her way to the bed, on which Clint is sprawled; his head buried under two pillows. “Clint. Up.”

 

“No,” Clint moans.

 

“Come on, I need a running buddy,” Natasha cajoles.

 

“Too early,” Clint whines, in a voice rather like a disgruntled puppy’s.

 

“Not in China. Up.”

 

Clint is roused, eventually, and they go for a jog through Central Park, Clint muttering ‘I hate yous’ throughout the whole first half hour. They stop for a short break, their breaths forming white puffs in the early hours of a cool New York autumn. It’s then Natasha tells him, the first person she’s said anything to.

 

Clint stops panting suddenly, turning to squint at her from where he’s doubled over, hands resting on his knees. “What?” He asks, straightening.

 

“Yup,” Natasha replies.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

It gets easier. It’s as if they’re starting over, and Natasha supposes that’s exactly what they’re doing. It’s a slow tug-of-war of a process, but as far as time goes, the ice melts rather quickly. Natasha notices, it’s just the awkwardness and the sheer situation they’re fighting. The going theory is that the months with nothing at all knocked the sight of that smirk right out of her head. Or maybe she just needs this to work badly enough that she’s propelling herself forward regardless. The truth of that is either half or whole.

 

But what she had told Steve had been completely true; she’s here because she loves him, and it’s why she’s trying her damnedest. And it works, eventually, because about two weeks after her run with Clint, Natasha’s standing between the strip of wall next to the refrigerator and Steve, her arms around his neck as they kiss. It’s different than the last time they did this, before Natasha left; it’s soft, and very like courtship. It isn’t meant to fix or prove or mean or _be_ anything; it’s meant to just be.

 

And it is, and they are, until they’re not, and she feels Steve freeze against her, his hands stiffening where they cup her hips.

 

He jerks away, and trips over his words, feet, and a chair before he makes it to the elevator.

 

“Steve…” Natasha trails away.

 

He looks at her and there’s something in his face Natasha doesn’t know, alongside guilt and shame and fear. “I…” Steve begins, reaching up and rubbing at the back of his neck. Then the elevator dings and the doors open, and they close on him and whatever he couldn’t escape fast enough to avoid saying, leaving Natasha leaning confused against a wall.

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

 

Steve stops to grab a sweatshirt as he leaves, because no matter how desperate and disjointed an escape attempt this is, he hasn’t underestimated cold in a long time, and he never will again. His feet pound a jarring but steadying rhythm into the ground of Central Park, as he runs, not caring to check his speed to remain inconspicuous.

 

He really can’t help the way he looks at the team on occasion. It’s been better, lately, but it still happens sometimes. He, after all, only saw actual Skrulls the first few weeks of his imprisonment. After that, they realized he wasn’t going to break that way. After that, they’d sent the team.

 

At first, they started small. A series of different breakout attempts. Then, they got trickier, and he woke up in fabricated rooms at the Tower, and to a Skrull impersonating one of the team, telling him he was safe now, and how thankful they were he was alive. Steve still finds it amazing, how spot-on the aliens got them. They started focusing on Natasha, and whomever they got to play her did her almost to a T.

 

Steve fell for none of it, even when they started employing narcotics to confuse him, he could feel them sliding through his veins. They realized, he wasn’t going to break that way either. Or, Steve thinks, they stopped needing him to, because the fishing for information stopped after that.

 

Maybe they were just warming up, and always meant to escalate, or maybe they just got bored. Either way, they stopped trying to manipulate him into thinking any of it was real. Oh, they still wore the masks, and they never admitted they were in fact Skrulls, but they changed the persons they played. They made his teammates into darker, evil iterations of themselves.

 

They had many a thread to choose to unravel. Steve Rogers had lived two lives.

 

Peggy didn’t do anything besides slap him, but her purpose was never physical torture. She sat in a folding chair at the end of the room they were in, and she watched him with a mixture of emotions. She looked away in the guilt that came from the petty vindictiveness of passive-aggressive torture. From making no move to help as his blood pooled on the floor, or denying him access to the jug of water that sat on a table in the corner of the room—which he supposed some camera caught him staring at for a good four minutes before Peggy came in. “I waited for you, you know. At the club,” she said, as she got up to leave. Despite himself, he turned his head to the sound of her footfalls. 

 

Bucky ranted, landing angry, methodical punches, and asking him if Sarah ever dropped him on his head as a child, because “you don’t know how to fly a damn plane, Steve!” After he’d been going for a while, he worked himself up to admitting he blamed Steve for his fall. He called him a punk as he swept out the door, slamming it behind him.

 

Of course, they couldn’t have even hoped to get him to think the people he had known before he crashed the Valkyrie were there, their real selves long since dead and buried, but they trotted them out anyway. Steve knew what they were doing, and they knew that he did, and they mocked him as they unraveled him. The team, though, was worse. They got everyone in there, even Pepper; Steve woke on one occasion to find her straddling him and cooing soft nothings with pouted lips, while Tony slowly bled out in a corner, as if she had been the one he’d been thinking of as they locked him in the dark.

 

It was worse with the Avengers, because as the months seeped away, what was real and what wasn’t bled away with his caring of such trivial things, as he grew too tired to keep reminding himself his torturers weren’t people he loved.

 

And Steve thought, he really thought, that he had still been able to tell the difference. And he had, because even when he didn’t actively remind himself of it, he still _knew_ the difference. But when he saw them again, what their doubles had done was still there, a one-sided wall between them all.

 

After they rescued him, it was Bruce that came to check his vitals, almost obsessively, because he was a perfectionist, and because he wouldn’t have been able to stand something happening to a friend on his watch. And it was Tony that sat next to him as his bones knit back together, telling him about his Enterprise and which suits he’d modified, because he has a good heart despite the pains he takes to hide it, and he’d been trying to tell him the camaraderie was still there.

 

 But it was also Bruce and Tony who had ruminated on whether or not they should reevaluate the effects of sensory deprivation. Who had tested how much heat Steve could stand before he started to blister irrevocably, or how long they could keep him underwater before his brain cells started to die. When he saw Tony and Bruce, he saw when the Skrulls had decided they could gain something from studying his serum, their scientists taking their faces.

 

Steve found he couldn’t separate the faces, the atrocities. He tried, he still does, but the Skrulls had poisoned his perception of those he loves, and he can’t keep the images away, the experiences. It’s why he didn’t blame Natasha for her distancing herself from him, and why he couldn’t, even if he’d wanted to.

 

Thor gave him a brief accounting of what Steve’s own double had done in his absence. (Thor was also the one who had regaled Steve with tales of his adventures with the Warriors Three as he fractured his collarbone. Who asked him if he was still having that nightmare they had worked through once at three in the morning over hot chocolate, as he smashed his head into the wall until his hair was sticky with blood that rolled down his face.) Steve had filled in the blanks, and understood.

 

He also understood when she had left. But he knew that the other Steve, and even her naturally untrusting personality, were only responsible for setting the frosty stage for the months before she departed. The reason why Natasha actually left, the one and only reason, was Steve’s apathy. But that—that he couldn’t help either.

 

It was Peggy and Bucky that had set his mental stage. It was Tony and Bruce that had studied him, and Clint and Bobbi that had gotten their hands dirty for them. It was Thor who was the heavy hitter. But it was Natasha that had been the real torturer, preformed the stylistics; the bamboo-under-the-nails and such. It was Natasha they focused on. Likely because it’s Natasha Steve loves.

 

They had long ago abandoned trying for genuine characterization. She had been replaced by the dark, twisted, sardonic, mocking fiend who straddled him, stabbed and cut him in all the places she could without causing too much damage; slowly, her voice low and lascivious, as if it was a physical encounter of a different kind. Natasha had done most everything Steve tried to forget.

 

He didn’t ask her why she left, because he knew, but he did miss her. When she came back, Steve tried his damnedest to focus on just fixing the relationship, and the images had been waning, so it wasn’t hard.

 

And then they finally had a breakthrough. They finally came close enough to being fixed that they were able to soundlessly exchange thoughts through the contact of their lips. And it hadn’t even been much of anything, her wrist just brushed his ear—but it had brought everything back. Thor had brutally rendered him broken and bleeding, and so when Natasha had slipped through his cell’s door, he had been powerless to resist. Steve had been powerless to do anything as Natasha sat behind him, legs wrapped around his waist, painfully tight against the broken ribs and internal injuries that hadn’t healed yet. The warmth of her breath had washed over the ear she pulled her teeth across, as she whispered things Steve doesn’t remember more than the hackle-raising presence of, because he had been half conscious when he’d heard them, the garroting wire she twisted between her palms drawing warm blood from the skin on his throat as he gasped for air.

 

The sad thing is, Steve loves Natasha. He loves how when she eats pizza, she saves the crust for last and eats it like a breadstick, dipping it in marinara sauce. He loves how competitive she used to get when she, Clint, and Tony would play Mario Kart. He loves the Russian pet names she has for him. He loves how when they kiss, she wraps her arms around his neck and sifts her fingers through his hair. He loves how he can never quite capture her eyes on paper, no matter how many times he draws them. He loves her nose and its shape, and he remembers fondly the time he had kissed snow off its tip. He loves how, on the times she allows herself such luxuries as to be actively happy, she curls on the couch like a well-fed, contented cat, leaning against him as she drowses. Steve loves Natasha Romanov. Loves her more than he’s loved anything since he’s woken up—maybe more than anything in any of the lives he’s lived. He thinks…he thinks a lot of things. He’s thought a lot of things, since Natasha’s left, but they all ended with the thought of her scent thick in his nose as he kissed her neck, as they wrapped themselves into each other to feel whatever each of them needed to find that night. Or perhaps, on the softer waves they ride on the better of the days they live, only to feel each other.

 

But Steve’s relived a lot of things, too, and when he has nightmares, he doesn’t scream, just wakes paralyzed with fear. Sometimes, when he looks at the one he loves and the enigma he could spend hours trying to puzzle out—although, if she knew, she’d say he wouldn’t want to know—her face swims into the twisted mask of the one who’d disemboweled him, asking, seductively, ‘how does that feel’, as his blood dribbled onto the concrete floor.

 

He tries to work past it, tries to shake it off, because he’s come through things just as bad and lost just as much, and he doesn’t think he can go through the latter again. He tries to suck out the poison that was injected into his bloodstream, like venom from a snakebite; tries to bleed himself of it, like the medicine of old, so he can look at Natasha and see who she really is, her image clear.

 

Steve tries, but the last few months of his imprisonment in space were spent in a numb silence, staring into space; and there’s a humming in his ears, that longs for a return to the ease of the numbness. But more, there’s a poison in his blood, in his mind, in his memories, filling those waking hours and yanking him out of sleep with a sound like nails shrieking on a chalkboard.

 

He’d like to leave, and he’d like to stay, and he’d like to go back, but he can’t go anywhere, because these four walls around him, which may or may not have been erected by his own hands, are made of solid steel. There is a chance, a barest glimmer of light sweeping through a chink in the walls, which says that Steve can break his way out, either by finagling or brute force; and maybe, maybe his extended stay is only for his lack of trying.

 

 


	4. Chapter 4

 

 

Natasha is sitting at the round kitchen table when Steve returns, nursing a mug of tea whose warmth has long ago dissipated, leaving the hands that wrap around it without comfort. She doesn’t say anything to break the silence, because she isn’t sure how Steve wants to keep that particular promise—and maybe, because she’s still a little peeved that he’d left. She realizes how hypocritical that is. Or maybe she’s just confused; and confusion is a vulnerability, and Natasha hates to be vulnerable.

 

“…The team’s supposed to be in Wyoming in three hours…” Steve says.

 

“I know,” she replies, and she does. She herself is staying behind; her excuse being that Fury had forced her to finally get on top of her paperwork. Natasha glances up at him, and sees he’s already in his uniform. He looks up at her from under a bowed head, shoulders curved sheepishly down to the floor.

 

Steve opens his mouth to say something, but closes it, a sigh blowing through his nostrils. He looks at her, chewing on the inside of his lip. “…I’m sorry,” he says softly, rubbing at the back of his neck. “I…” he trails away, hand dropping back down to his side, embarrassed that Captain America’s perfect speeches are eluding him. “I… There are things…I should have told you,” he says apologetically, pleadingly. “Reasons. And I just… I couldn’t… I’ll explain…when I get back. Okay? I promise, I promise, I’ll— Can I just— I’ll tell you. When I get back.”

 

“Okay, Steve,” Natasha replies quietly. He nods, and exits. Once she’s alone again, Natasha sighs deeply, her hands scrubbing up and down her face, before she just hides, her head dropping heavily into cupped palms.

 

Or, maybe, Natasha’s just a little too desperate for this to work.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Natasha wonders what she’s doing, as she steps out of the Tower’s elevator, having just come back from doing that paperwork at SHIELD. She wonders if coming back was the right decision. She wonders how things would have happened for her and Steve, if the Skrull invasion had never happened. She thinks they could have been happy.

 

And certainly, many different things would be easier for her now, if they had never started what they had. (Natasha supposes that’s the price paid, for happiness and having it—having it grow.)

 

Natasha wonders if she’s chasing a shadow. (She wonders if Steve has ever really been happy here, in the future-slash-present. When she watches his eyes be hollow, or watches the PTSD-riddled twenty-seven-year-old people hardly see from under the suit and shield, she wonders if he sometimes wishes he had died on that plane; just as she sometimes wishes she had reached some kind of an end by now.) She wonders how many people could have been spared, situations simplified, if she had never accepted Clint’s offer of salvation. She wonders what had happened, out on that base, floating in inky space at a midpoint between two galaxies.

 

As the water for the shower she decided to take heats, Natasha examines herself in the bathroom mirror, clad only in her undergarments. She turns to the side, critically watching her profile. She wonders if it’s been a futile attempt, if there’s anything left to fix; she wonders if they would have been better off staying away, after Natasha left to finish selling what’s left of her soul to Fury.

 

Natasha sighs, pulling her gaze away from her reflection. She’s running out of time, and ambiguity. The Black Widow has always hated deadlines she doesn’t set for herself.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Natasha crosses her arms in a hallway of the floor SHIELD’s New York base sets aside for Medical. Tony stands before her, bruised and cut in places, most notably a mottled injury under his right eye. He gives her an accounting of what had happened on the assignment. Fury had come to the team with an 0-8-4 in Wyoming that needed to be contained. It turned out to be some kid, an intern that had escaped an explosion that had leveled the lab he had been working in, and left him with some strange abilities. The kid couldn’t hope to control himself—the cause of the carnage that had led SHIELD to him in the first place. According to Tony, the team had caught up to him high in the Rockies, and tried to reason with him. But the poor kid had been deteriorating for a while now, and apparently reached his finale, because he exploded, or something. He caused the avalanche that landed most of the team in Medical, though Steve seems to be the worst off.

 

“The official story?” Tony says. “We weren’t able to get him in time, and the avalanche got to him.”

 

“The official story?” Natasha asks.

 

Tony sighs, takes her by the arm, and leads her to a supply closet. He activates something in his watch, which apparently shields them from listening devices. “We thought this would be better, keeping it quiet, since he hasn’t been able to get away from Psych since the invasion, until recently.”

 

“Tony, what happened out there?”

 

He sighs again. “We think it was the snow that did it. From, you know, the crash. He snapped, or something. Wouldn’t let any of us near him—we actually got away from the avalanche pretty clean; most of the scrapes we got are from that. He ran, after that; it took the suit to find him, and Thor to get him to stop. That freaked him out. It’s how he got hurt; Thor had to…subdue him.”

 

“I see,” is all Natasha says.

 

Tony scrubs a hand over his eyes. “It’s been better, I thought,” he says. “He hasn’t been like this in a while.”

 

“What do you mean?” Natasha asks, pulled back out of her thoughts and the examination of a roll of gauze sitting on a shelf.

 

“When you left, Steve… I don’t know if it was because you left, or just because, but, after you were gone a couple of weeks, he…locked himself in a closet, for fifteen days.”

 

“…I didn’t know that,” Natasha says quietly. “He never told me.”

 

“Well, he probably didn’t want you to feel badly,” Tony says, and Natasha doesn’t know if she’s reading too much into it, or if there really is an accusation in his voice.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Steve wakes to fuzziness. His eyes pull slowly open. He’s in a SHIELD recovery room, as sparse as they usually are. The only light comes from the white fluorescent bulbs set high in the ceiling of the hallway, which doesn’t quite reach through the half-closed door, leaving the room in cool shadow. Steve hears a sigh, and his eyes drift to the woman next to the bed.

 

Natasha sits in the chair situated there, slumped forward, hands loosely crossed low over her waist as she stares at the floor to her right, lost in thought. Her eyes flicker down, and she seems to find something wrong with the placement of her arms, because, straightening, she unwraps them from her waist. She is at a loss for where to put them, for a moment, before she settle for resting her hands on her legs, palms rubbing her thighs awkwardly. Natasha stills, and she sighs, deflating ever so slightly, one of her hands coming up to run through short red curls. She looks worried. She hasn’t seemed to notice that Steve watches her from under thick lashes and heavily lidded eyes.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Natasha sits next to Steve on the floor, where he slid down against the wall. He fills the time by picking at the cast on his forearm, which Thor had apologized for profusely.

 

“Hey,” she says gently, and even though she isn’t sure this is something one prompts someone to say, she thinks it’s been too long. “What happened, out there?”

 

“I thought Tony told you,” Steve says.

 

“He wasn’t where I’m talking about.”

 

Steve lapses back into silence. “…I love you, you know,” he says. “I should have said that, more, but I didn’t. But I do. Love you.”

 

“I know, Steve,” Natasha says. She debates the action, before hesitantly wrapping her arm around his shoulders, leaning over and resting her head against his. He doesn’t seem to react badly to the contact, so she stays.

 

“I should have listened, when you warned me about the promises I make,” he says.

 

“I’ve been wrong before, about making promises,” Natasha replies, lamenting her usable truths.

 

Steve goes on to weave a stilted tale of torture, and one of the worst parts, besides the guilt and the knowledge that the repercussions are far from over, is realizing that he’s sugarcoating it—and she knows he is, she can feel the thick taste of it on the back of her tongue. Natasha has always known, when she got around to finding out to specifics, it would be something horrible. But somehow, she doesn’t think she really did know.

 

When Steve finally trails away into an ending, Natasha wonders many things. Some of them sanguinary, some of them no longer relevant, some of them selfish, and most of them practical. But, she finds, practicalities can wait, and now really isn’t the time. So she sits on the floor with Steve; her husband, Captain America, the man who hadn’t been irate at his displacement for a long time, but had been, when the team was first formed, and his abyss loomed larger.

 

Natasha sits, and Steve buries his face in her neck, breathing deeply, and he either comes apart or back together.

 


	5. Chapter 5

 

She would like to wait longer, but she’s running out of time. So a few days after his midnight confessions, Natasha tells Steve she’s pregnant.

 

“…Why didn’t you say anything?” He asks, and it figures, that the untruth would be what he settles on first. It’s also, out of all the things she’s just told him, the easiest to settle on, so maybe he’s just starting small.

 

“Sorry,” she says.

 

There is a moment of contemplative silence. “So that’s why you came back…” Steve muses, just a tad bitter.

 

“No,” Natasha says forcefully, “no. That is not why I came back. And _that’s_ why I didn’t say anything; so you wouldn’t think I was running back here and forcing you into something. I came back here, because I love you. I told you that, and I meant it.”

 

“So if you didn’t love me, what—you would have disappeared with it?”

 

“No. Maybe—I don’t know. Yes, probably, but only because it would have been a bad environment to raise a kid in, if we weren’t happy with each other. If we weren’t going to work, I would’ve been fine on my own,” Natasha says, and the feminist in her might puff up a bit at that.

 

“Fine,” Steve acquiesces. “But when you decided to come back, you could have said something.”

 

“No, I couldn’t have,” Natasha sighs, “because you would have been _noble_ , and like I said, neither of us need to be forced into something like this. And… I don’t know, maybe… I came back because I had the vibe, sure, but I still couldn’t know; I still had to see.”

 

“Finish the thought, Natasha,” Steve returns. “You wanted to see if I wasn’t insane, before you tied yourself to me. You wanted to make sure we weren’t still walking in acid whenever we were in a room together.”

 

“No!” Natasha returns. “That isn’t true. Well, maybe, but… Dammit, Steve—I wasn’t being calculating about this! And when I was, it was only for it’s sake. I just… When I left, Steve, we weren’t working about as much as two people couldn’t. And yes: it would have been easier for me to stay away, on so many levels. It would have been easier for me to not even bother to see if there was anything still here. But I loved you too much,” Natasha says, not caring how sentimental that truth is. “I had to see if there was _anything_ , _anywhere_ , that I could still fix.” It had been a desperate woman, grasping at straws she didn’t know would hold. “But there was. There _is_.

 

“And then there’s you. When I left, Steve…you weren’t doing exceptionally well. And I know that by that logic I shouldn’t have left at all, and I’m sorry for that, but that’s not the point. When I said that I didn’t want to force you into anything, I meant it. I just…I wanted to make sure that we were…that you were happy, before…you had to be,” Natasha finishes, not quite sure of her wording.

 

“…And if I wasn’t?” Steve asks softly. “If we weren’t? Would you have left again?”

 

Natasha sighs. “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know if I would have needed to… And if I did, I don’t know…if I would have been able…to.”

 

Steve looks at her for a long moment. Then he leans across the loveseat they’re sitting on, cups the back of her head with one large hand, and kisses her, long and full. “Well then thank God you didn’t need to,” he whispers.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

SHIELD already knows about her ‘condition’—the fictional paperwork Fury had asked her to do, which was really Natasha formally bowing out of field duty and giving her reasons—so there’s nothing left to work out. She’s not enthusiastic about playing the desk jockey, but she does. Because she’s too afraid of losing something she doesn’t really know she wants.

 

The child she carries should be impossible. The Black Widow was made to be efficient, deadly, perfect—the Black Widow was made to be infertile. She supposes Steve’s serum, maybe combined with hers, is what made it possible. But _possible_ is less than half the battle.

 

The Black Widow was made to be efficient, and she does everything she does perfectly. Therefore, there is no evidence that she won’t perform pregnancy perfectly. Not yet. But her body has a history of betraying her, and Natasha can’t shake the feeling that she’ll fail. She doesn’t see how, after all these years, her body will start to do anything beyond what it’s been made to do. So she walks on eggshells, almost subconsciously. That run with Clint is the most strenuous thing she’s done since she found out, and it was only taken because she has the nagging feeling SHIELD bugs the Tower, and she had wanted to tell Fury herself.

 

But that’s only part of her problem. The biggest piece of it is her, and her absolute, irrefutable inability to have a mothering instinct. Her worry is the clock that keeps ticking, the baby that keeps growing, the due date that keeps approaching. (Natasha tells herself, that stress is bad, too, but it’s harder to quell.) The Black Widow destroys life. That’s it and that’s all. And even if she can manage to bring it about, nurturing it is a whole different animal; a rabid one, foaming at the mouth and ruining what could otherwise be beautiful.

 

And then there’s Steve, whom Natasha still can’t touch sometimes; and then there are the other times, when his body’s here but the soul behind his eyes is somewhere else. Steve, who Natasha can tell is having a terrified freak-out of his own, if he does all the right things. (Noble. She called that one, didn’t she?) And then there is the matter of Steve and herself.

 

None of it makes for readiness, in any way, shape, or form.

 

But Natasha chose this. She decided to keep the life she had somehow created, when she found out; only a few months ago, for all its feeling like a lifetime. She chose this. And the sad part is, if things were different, she thinks she and Steve could have wanted this.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Natasha sits next to Clint on the couch in silence. Taking her hand in one of his larger, calloused ones, he proceeds to rub away the tension between her fingers. He closes her hand into a fist, raises it to his lips, and softly kisses her knuckles, the beginnings of stubble on his chin scratching over her joints.

 

“You have to stop letting these run your life,” he says. And he’s right. If for no other reason than Natasha can’t afford to anymore. (The Black Widow has always hated deadlines she doesn’t set for herself.)

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

The sad thing is, that if things were different, Natasha thinks she and Steve could have wanted this. Sad, but true, and so it turns out to be a saving grace, a self-fulfilling prophesy. Natasha chose this, when she decided not to have an abortion. Steve chooses it, when he starts actually sleeping next to her again, instead of just sharing a mattress with her that may as well be a mile wide, and when he kisses her temple and says into the darkness, “I have a feeling it’s going to be a girl.”

 

They both chose, and it’s beginning to be a different kind of choice, instead of the one you make because it’s thrust irrevocably upon you.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Natasha lies awake sometimes, in the dark, and on her side, because she’s read that’s best. She likes to listen to what her life has become. There’s an impressionistic softness, in the still, quiet dark, and nothing is wrong in it; and, if she lets herself, the thoughts of the problems of tomorrow don’t penetrate the quiet either.

 

She likes to feel Steve’s warmth seeping into her shoulders and back, the steady, reassuring rise and fall of his chest as he breathes, and the arm he drapes over her waist. She likes to feel the little girl she carries inside her—and yes, a girl, they’ve found out recently. (Perhaps that new knowledge was the turning point. Perhaps that was what made them start to want.) Natasha revels in her presence, in her life.

 

When her daughter moves, Natasha smiles, her eyes closed, to better see her own emotions. She realizes, she might be forgetting again. She might be loving again; living. But here’s the catch: Natasha _doesn’t care_. She has a man becoming more whole by the day, kissing her neck in passing for the sake of doing it, fingers brushing over the ever-growing swell of her abdomen. And most importantly, there is a little girl, a _little girl_ coming closer and closer to being truly _real_ , and Natasha thinks holding her will be the best thing she’s ever done.

 

She could be making the same mistakes. She could be blind to not see how she can’t throw whatever irrational, contingency-plan cautions she has to the wind.

 

But it feels irrationally good when, in the dead of night, Natasha presses her palms to her middle, and her little, impossible life presses back. The only offered sounds are that of Steve’s breathing and the ceiling fan, both swirling softly in the background. She and her daughter are the only things that exist, in those moments.

 

And she doesn’t care.

 

 


	6. Chapter 6

 

 

Natasha stands in a Walgreens, the entrance in full view, comparing the merits of two shampoos. She doesn’t lift her eyes from the bottles as two men enter, about a minute apart, making sure to keep her eyes shifting down the lines of small black letters she isn’t reading.

 

The Avengers have many enemies. So does Captain America, the number greater than most might think; and there is no shortage of people with a score to settle with the Black Widow. Natasha knows this, and she knows the way the number of suspicious men shifting between the aisles is slowly growing, each of them trickling inconspicuously in on their own, though she knows they form a group.

 

Normally, Natasha would have made her escape after sighting the first two agents, braving the others that are no doubt guarding the entrances. But she’s been walking on eggshells since she found out. She hasn’t set foot anywhere near a combat situation for the duration of her pregnancy. She carries an impossible hope. She holds her little girl’s life in her hands.

 

And so Natasha waits; impossible, detrimental seconds, minutes. She doesn’t dare make a move, and she doesn’t dare reach into her purse, not for the gun or the phone. She does manage to make it to the bathroom, through some finagling.

 

Natasha locks the door behind her, leaning against the strip of wall next to the door. She calls Tony, gives him her location. He tells her to sit tight, tells her to stay safe, tells her they’ll be there as soon as they can. Natasha knows they will, and she knows they could travel the distance between them in record time, due to the technology and desperation at their disposal. But as she hides in a poorly lit Walgreens bathroom, pressed against a wall, the handgun she keeps in her purse in her hand, she knows she doesn’t have the time to wait. She can’t afford the wait—but she can’t afford not to. Natasha raises a hand to her stomach as her daughter squirms inside her, and the touch is steadying, preparatory, because she can’t face the knowledge of it being a goodbye.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Natasha dodges the fist swung in her direction, moving behind her attacker; she grabs his jacket and throws him against a support pillar, his head hitting it with a crack.

 

She pivots, a little unsteadily and a little too late, crying out as another man’s knee connects with the base of her distended abdomen, just above her right hip. Natasha staggers, leaning into the man and causing him to stumble backwards with her. She manages to recover first, just barely, and lashes out, her elbow coming down on his windpipe in a sloppy arc.

 

He falls, and Natasha steps around him, grabbing an umbrella out of a bin, and jabbing it into the stomach of the next advancing agent. He doubles over, and Natasha twirls the umbrella around, hitting him in the side of the head with the handle, sending him sprawling into a tower of cashew containers.

 

As Natasha straightens from her swing, a pair of arms appears from behind, trying to subdue her. She elbows their owner hard in the ribs, aiming a kick at his shins; a maneuver she’s executed many times before. Now, however, her reflexes not quite where they should be, she can’t separate herself from the man in time. She goes down with him, landing hard on her left side.

 

Natasha feels the agent move behind her, and she reaches back, smashing her elbow down into what feels like a face. She twists back around, and sees another agent standing about a yard away. A question of seconds is what lets the agent be the one to fall, and Natasha the one to take the shot.

 

As Natasha uses a shelf containing nail polish to push herself up to a standing position, panting and pressing a flat palm to the spot on her stomach the agent had dug his knee into, it registers that the fight was more arduous than such a conflict usually is. It’s a struggle to get back to her feet, but she does it. Natasha makes for the back entrance, staggering a little more than she’d like. As she passes, she flashes the pharmacist huddled behind a display of hair products what would have been a friendly, easy smile, but ended up being more of a physical wince.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

She was right about there being more agents manning the entrances.

 

Natasha looks over her shoulder upon hearing a noise behind her, but the cause turns out to be nonthreatening, so she turns back to navigating the network of back alleys she’s found herself in. It occurs to Natasha that the team will have a harder time finding her, the further away she gets from the Walgreens. She’s in desperate need of what she habitually keeps thinking of as an extraction, she knows, but she also knows that getting as far away from her assailants as possible is just as important; it’s why she couldn’t stay in that bathroom. She would do it anyway, as she was never the type to needlessly stray near a fight; but here, now, Natasha thinks she physically couldn’t take another confrontation. Neither of them could.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Natasha lets out a yell as another horrible, searing sensation throbs through her midsection, doubling her over, so low that the hand that isn’t still loosely gripping her handgun can almost touch the ground.

 

She manages a few more steps, before she slides down against a wall. She sits there, breathing heavily, the occasional moan blowing past her lips. It isn’t lost on Natasha how exposed her position is, and given her current state, it’s nearly impossible to think that she could even aim straight if her pursuers should catch up with her—and given her slow progress, they probably will. But she can barely breathe past the pain, only managing quick, small gasps, and she doesn’t think she could move if she cared enough to try.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

She’s aware of the hard concrete of the wall behind her head. She’s aware of the throbbing. She’s aware of explosions that sound far away, though she can feel waves of heat. She’s aware of a voice to go with the hands on her shoulder, maybe both of them Steve’s. She’s aware of being lifted off the ground.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

When Natasha wakes, there is a moment of padded, fuzzy nothingness, until she remembers; then, there is a moment of terror, until she realizes that yes, yes, her little girl is still with her.

 

She looks to her left, and sees Steve sitting next to the hospital bed in a chair too low for him, his knees knocking up to his chest. He gives her a watery smile, his red-rimmed eyes not in it. “Hi,” he says.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

It was a very near miss, she’s told. Natasha’s honestly surprised her daughter made it at all, let alone wasn’t forced to meet the world too soon. She’s surprised, surprised her body wasn’t provoked into efficiency, but she’s endlessly grateful, and endlessly scared.

 

Natasha’s released from the SHIELD hospital, under strict orders to do next to nothing. She spends a week this way, falling asleep at night with Steve pulling her close, sweeping his thumb across her midsection, ghosting soft kisses over her temple.

 

Natasha wakes on one of these nights, the bedroom dark and quiet, not quite knowing what woke her. She sucks in a breath through her nose as a throbbing, pulsating sensation thrums through her abdomen, eliciting a low moan from her as it reached its zenith. It dies away, and Natasha lies in the dark for a moment, propped up on her elbows, her eyes held wide open with the fear that keeps her frozen. The sensation’s second iteration takes from her another groan, this one waking Steve.

 

“What is it?” He asks, rolling over with a rustle of sheets to face her, and Natasha doesn’t respond, because he answers his own question with a few rapid glances.

 

They get out of bed in an unorganized manner. Natasha finds she can’t quite stand up straight, supporting herself with a hand on the mattress, the other held against her midsection. Steve stands at her elbow, asking her what’s wrong, and she tells him she doesn’t know, and they fall silent when a choked cry pushes past her lips, and they watch dumbly as a bloody liquid drips down her legs.

 

Natasha’s still staring when Steve scoops her up, hollering for JARVIS, and then there’s Tony coming through over the intercom, and then Pepper asking what’s going on, and then Clint, sounding slightly frantic, and then there’s a thud as he seems to fall out of bed, sounding like he took Bobbi with him. Bruce wins out over the chaos, telling Steve to get down to lab and that he’s calling Medical, and so when they get into the elevator, that’s where JARVIS takes them. Natasha feels slightly removed from it all, and very small.

 

 


	7. Chapter 7

 

 

It’s a miracle either of them survive.

 

The SHIELD doctors say they don’t quite know what exactly went wrong, what caused it all; a delayed reaction to her run-in with the agents, perhaps. They’re not completely wrong, but they’ve never understood her serum. Natasha knows better. She knows that, after the incident at the Walgreens, her body began to view her pregnancy as a threat, and so started to fight against it. And it’s the only explanation that fits, really, because of course it could only ever be her own fault that she couldn’t keep her little girl safe.

 

Natasha doesn’t see her. She can’t exactly, as she’s recovering herself, but she supposes if she really wanted to she could have someone take her to the pediatric ward SHIELD for some reason even _has_ in a wheelchair, or the hospital bed, even. But she doesn’t, and so it’s through second-hand knowledge that she knows how small her little girl is, abnormally so; small, and surviving on the edge of chaos, more so, even, that before she was born.

 

Natasha doesn’t see her, but Steve does, halving his time and spending it with either her or Natasha, sleep barely ever entering the equation. He’s in the recovery room they have Natasha in, one day, and she can feel him standing behind her, rubbing her shoulders. He leans down and whispers into her hair, “She’s perfect, you know.”

 

His words register, as does their hideous irony and, despite that, absolute truth. Natasha has a moment of apathy, before she starts to sob.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

It shouldn’t be this way, Natasha thinks; but then, with the Black Widow involved, what other way was it supposed to go?

 

When Natasha is finally allowed to get up and walk, she gets around to seeing her daughter. The Black Widow hates appearing vulnerable almost as much as she hates being vulnerable, but this is different; she doesn’t have it in her to care. A part of her remembers that she’d forgotten, again, and opened herself up to a world of hurt, of an entirely different kind than she’s ever experienced before. But what is she supposed to do? If she couldn’t manage to distance herself from Steve, she sure as hell won’t manage distancing herself from her daughter.

 

And Natasha doesn’t want to. She knows he should, regardless of her mantra, because she’s been told by a handful of doctors that her daughter’s chances of surviving her mother’s warped womb, even considering her father’s enhancements, are slim. But as Natasha watches her little girl through the walls of an incubator with the Stark Industries logo stamped in one corner and the SHIELD eagle in another, all she can think is how much she’d like to touch her.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Natasha wanders through her floor at the Tower. Steve had spent several hours here, because Natasha and others had finally convinced him that he needed sleep and time away, and when he’d gotten back to the hospital he’d told Natasha to do the same. She had been reluctant to go, because if her little girl should decide to leave this world, she wants to be there. But she hadn’t wanted to admit this logic of hers to Steve, or even put those words into the atmosphere at all, lest they should become true.

 

So here Natasha is, wandering about her floor. She finds herself standing outside the door of the nursery that had been prepared for the daughter that hasn’t managed to see it yet, and for some reason, she goes in. She’s surprised to find delicate, excruciatingly beautiful vines painted on the walls, flowers of different colors sprouting up at regular intervals as the plant climbs up to the ceiling, and she supposes this is why Steve had looked like he hadn’t actually slept when he’d gotten back to the hospital.

 

Natasha does, though, and wakes up tired; too tired, in fact, to drive back to SHIELD, and so she takes a cab. The days bleed into each other, as did those before them. Neither she nor Steve mention the mural, and she thinks it’s because of the natural delicacy of flowers. They’re easily crushed.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

In the end, it’s hypothesized that Steve’s serum is the only thing that lets their daughter survive being born just six months after her conception and the extra havoc Natasha had wreaked upon her—which she knows she’ll feel an everlasting guilt for—and without lasting damage, no less. She is, as she always has been, an impossible life.

 

Natasha stands watching her little girl breathe—just breathe—with awe and relief, Steve next to her, having just been definitively told by three different SHIELD doctors that she’ll likely be fine. Natasha runs the pad of her index finger over her palm, and, almost reflexively, her tiny fingers close around it; and, almost reflexively, an almost unhinged smile spreads over Natasha’s face. Steve rests his chin on her shoulder, and Natasha knows by feel that he’s biting his lower lip. She realizes, then, that though she was born weeks ago, her little girl has yet to have a name.

 

 

 

******

 

 

 

Kathleen Sarah Rogers is a miracle. Natasha watches everything she does with awe and a tight feeling gripping her chest like a vise. Whenever she laughs, Natasha smiles, because it’s such a _good_ sound. She’s healthy and whole, now, and as perfect a little girl as ever there was, which Natasha whispers into her hair most every night after she falls asleep. Natasha watches everything Kathleen does and makes a conscious effort of having her burned into her memory, because she’s still so afraid of losing something she isn’t sure she should have. But wants. Desperately wants.

 

Steve stays a bit away, at first, from both of them. Not to say he’s distant, but he _is_ , beyond what’s expected of him, beyond what’s noble. He goes through the motions. But eventually, he drifts closer, first to Natasha, and then to Kathleen; and when he finally, definitively bonds with Kathleen, it’s seamless, and makes Natasha’s heart swell and shrivel.

 

Kathleen turns out to be their catalyst. Natasha and Steve don’t hash anything else out, not really, and these things never resolve themselves that way, anyway. They take time. Copious, arduous amounts of time. But when one has a toddler waking one up at six in the morning because of an overwhelming need for waffles and hide-and-seek, copious, arduous amounts of time are hard to squirrel away for oneself.

 

Natasha supposes this is better, though, as she wears a quiet smile and watches Kathleen climb into their bed as the sun begins to stream through the window, settling onto Steve’s chest cross-legged and with perfect perky posture. Steve greets her with a euphoric smile, tucking her wild curls behind her ears, laughing when she asks if they can go back to the zoo they went to yesterday. After all, when people face a death or a depression, aren’t they counseled to get and stay busy? Isn’t that what eventually worked for Steve, when he spent most of 2013 angry and lethargic and lamenting lost dances?

 

Not to say there’s an immediate fix-it. Steve still flinches with her, sometimes; Natasha still learns where and how she shouldn’t touch him, and that things are usually better if she lets him know she’s in the room before she does. And not to say there will ever be a _cure_ ; Natasha still hasn’t gotten over her angsts completely, and still wakes up some nights feeling sticky with blood. Steve still clicks his phone on the first thing after he wakes to check the date, because he's terrified of sleeping through his life again. And Natasha can't keep her gun and knife under the bed, anymore, because of Kathleen, but she wants to. (But Steve still keeps his shield next to the nightstand, and Natasha trusts him to keep them both safe long enough for her to find her weapons, and she supposes the real focus should rest on that.)

 

But, these things take time, copious, arduous amounts of time. Natasha watches Kathleen develop a proclivity to sciences, which Tony, Jane, and Bruce trip over themselves to encourage. She watches her enjoy the fact that she shares a name with a character from the Magic Tree House series. She watches her color with Steve, crayons spread over the kitchen table. She watches as she delivers the sarcastic quips Tony feeds her line by line with perfect timing and in perfect context. As Steve does most anything she asks, no matter how silly—aside from what he’d do to keep her safe, what they’d all do. Natasha watches as she pumps a small fist in the air whenever Thor walks into the room, because of his lesson that that’s what Asgardian warriors do before a charge. As Clint does the goofy uncle to a T, Darcy and Jane following close behind, Pepper, Bobbi, and Betty the acting doting aunts, if a bit more reserved. As Bruce begins to teach her Hindi, aside from the smatterings of Russian and Gaelic and Brooklyn slang she’s learning from her parents. Natasha realizes, that while the Avengers aren’t a time bomb, they are a collection of people with mismatched scars, and she and Steve aren’t the only people that will benefit from Kathleen’s presence. And, she realizes, they have nothing but time.

 

When Kathleen is three years old, Steve locks himself in a closet again. It’s for hours, not days, but Natasha kneels leaning against the door with her hand pressed against the cool wood, trying to see if it’s still possible to hold his hand, and she realizes why Tony never forgot this.

 

But he’s in there for hours, not days, and so when Pepper comes back from the museum with Kathleen, Steve greets them with Natasha, and when Kathleen asks if he’ll draw with her, he says yes. Natasha wonders if he’s just playing the part, but all he does is watch their daughter scribble with crayons with a special kind of look, and Natasha thinks he agreed because he needed to.

 

He tells her, that night, his reasons. He tells her, he didn’t go down with the Valkyrie, but with the slow burn of ice and the throb of massive internal injuries. “It was…cold. And…wet,” Steve tells her, though Natasha hadn’t asked. “…I’m sorry,” he asks, because apologies are always a question. “I shouldn’t have… I’m sorry.”

 

Natasha sighs, her response slow to form correctly. “You know…I don’t think being a parent means you have to be eternally perfect,” she muses, because it’s been a thought that’s been circulating lately. “I think it’s impossible. And honestly, I think it might be better if we’re not. It won’t set such an impossible standard for her, and she can learn better from our mistakes than our perfection.”

 

Steve doesn’t say anything, for a long time, and Natasha has begun to stop waiting for him to, and debates the merits of indulging in her habit of watching Kathleen sleep, when he says, “I don’t deserve you.”

 

He says it with such utter faith and acceptance, and this moment is about his issues, anyway, not hers, so she doesn’t disagree.

 

Not to say she doesn’t have issues.

 

She wakes sometimes, quaking with blood and ice and the voices of men, hyperventilating and fighting slipping into the blankness of an escape. But Steve is always there, calling her back, calling her name.

 

Natasha breathes his words, her hands coming up to catch onto his presence, to hold his face between her hands, eyes wide and manic until she realizes the past still can’t touch her. Then she buries herself into him, her face pressed against his chest and her fingers twisting his shirt. She binds herself to him as best she can. And Steve just lies there, holding her firmly, but soft and relaxed. The nonchalance grounds her.

 

After one of these, Natasha is sitting on the floor of Kathleen’s bedroom, leaning against the wall, knees drawn up to her chest, watching her sleep.

 

She stirs, and wakes, blearily registering her mother in the haze of the nightlight. “What’re you doing, Mommy?” Kathleen slurs.

 

“Watching you sleep,” Natasha whispers.

 

“Why?”

 

That night, Kathleen learns the definition of the word panacea.  

 

The next morning, Natasha wakes to her daughter lying between herself and Steve. She thinks Steve has been up for a while, watching Kathleen. His eyes shift from her to Natasha. “You did good,” he says, looking her straight in the eye.

 

Natasha brushes Kathleen’s hair out of her face, expression softening when she doesn’t wake at the touch, just snuggles deeper into Natasha’s side. Her world means everything to her, and her world is Kathleen.

 

And maybe Natasha did do okay, or maybe she isn’t, but there’s an impressionistic softness in the early morning, so she just smiles, all sleepy agreement.

 

After all, they’ve got nothing but time.

 

 

 

FIN

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone who's read this!


End file.
